OLD AUCKLAND.

Auckland Star, Volume LIII, Issue 89, 15 April 1922, Page 17

OLD AUCKLAND.

VANISHED INSTITUTIONS OF THE PAST. — (By ISA/BEL MAUD FEACOCKE.) In the get-rich-quick spirit of thai times and the hurly-burly of trade competition of to-day one sometimes realises with an odd pang of startled regret that some old institution of the past has vanished almost unnoticed. One of our writers wrote recently of the passing of the old-time cabman —that almost historic figure—pushed from the rank by his modern successor in his noisy, malodorous, hustling juggernaut of a machine. A\Tiere are the old fourwheelers with their air of rather haughty exclusiveness and rich sobriety? where the jingling hansoms so obviously designed for a solitude a deux? Where the old horse-bus of our childhood, with its hot red plush seats, where one sat with dangling feet, working with unconscious fingers to loosten the red plush buttons? Where that quaint little onehorse conveyance with a leathern hood, shaped like an old lady's poke bonnet, and two little ovals of horny mica let into the rear of the hood like two dim, lidless eyes? All lost, gone, vanished into the limbo of the past along with the travelling tinker and scissors-grinder who mended your pots and pans or sharpened your scissors while you waited: and the lamp-lighter who trotted on his rounds at dusk with his short ladder on his shoulder, making light in dark places. To-day Cliinaman —I should say Mister See So Sly, or Wot Xot —dresses his window with elaborately decor effect and sits down to await with ■ dence the custom of the "foreign de With his raggedly-clipped poll, hi fitting European clothing, and his guidly nonchalant air he is not n so interesting a figure as John Chinaman of twenty-live years or so ago. Then he was a welcome and quaintlypicturesque sight jog-trotting along with iiis stout cane yoke upon his shoulders, a deep wicker basket overflowing with grcenstuffs dancing at either end, upon his head a flapping broad-brimmed hat which concealed, we knew, his long glossy-black queu, cherished passport to his quaint homeland. He was always hailed as "John," and answered amiably to the title; he was cheerful, ingratiating, smiling. He had little English, but made his "pidgin" English do very well. With his long, black eyes—mere twinkling slits in his round yellow face he said with cheerful loquacity: "Cabbagee —lettucee —welly good—callot—all nice an' flesh. Fi'-pin — four-pin — too muchee? AH light—you takee pin. Mc come one time again " Sometimes to a good customer he would bring a. pretty little glazed and netted pot of chow-chow and refuse payment with a friendly grin. We all liked "John." We never thought of him then as the "yellow peril" or the "thin end of the wedge," but just as "John," a time-honoured institution.

Another picturesque little touch of the East in those days was afforded by the Indian hawkers, sleek, silent, swarthy fellows, with a light, stately tread, as different in their dignity and silent obsequiousness to the half-Euro-pean ised furtive-eyed Hindus who infest our city to-day as is a majestic hound to a slinking coyote. They were spare, upright, dignified, buttoned trimly into their long black gentlemanly coats, a scarlet fez upon their sleek black heads, and they carried their American cloth bundles with an "air." They were silent gentry, saying little —having no farce of an education test to go through, they were not possessed of a few glib, parrotphrases in English—and so made up in quick gestures and deep salaams for their deficiency. In their bundles weresoft, filmy tissues of silk and lace, flashing beetles' wing scarves and fans, bracelets and necklets iridescent with the barbaric jewels of the East, and from the whole rich collection was wafted a strange, bizarre, half-fascinating, halfrepellant odour of spices and incense, the perfume and essence of the immemorial East had we but known it, as we sniffed it with our little Western noses and pronounced it a "funny smell," The "n_u___s-and-crumpets" boy was another institution unknown to the children of to-day, but eagerly looked for in our day on his weekly visits, and when he appeared with his flat basket covered with a white cloth, cleverly poised upon his head, the small fry answered to his welcome whistle with enthusiasm.

Another regular house-to-house visitor—unregretted perhaps — was the Italian organ-grinder, with his wizened monkey dressed, like a little old man or woman, who danced and bowed—or showed his teeth ill-temperedly—and collected the infrequent coins in a little red cap, or pouched them in his lean hairy cheek. The whining jaunty airs ground out of the barrel-organ in its tarnished velvet draperies were, no doubt, a painful travesty on music, but the fascination of "da monk" was the real lure which brought us flocking round the ill-conditioned, shifty-eyed foreigner, who mechanically ground "out his airs. Tlie gramophone at the street corners has put the organ and the monkey out of business, and the children of to-day are so used to marvels —machines that fly. machines that run by their own power, the living voice imprisoned in a square box, pictures with all the motions of life—that there seems nothing left to surprise them with, but I venture to believe that there were a few thrills and pleasures unknown to them that wp experienced in our day. If we did not have the gramophone we had th<mtisical box. thinly sweet, from which ;one might grind one's 0..n tunes, two a j penny: if we had not the motor car, mowing down the populace, we had the old bone-shaker bicycle, with its one ! immense wheel and an absurd baby (wheel to follow; if v, had no moving [pictures, we had the good old magi.: j lantern, its forerunner, the colour?'! j slides of which, by a ijftle manipulatir.il. j could be made to move too; and if wr | had not as a spectacle tho aeroplane | looping the loop over our innocent i heads, we had. f rom time to time, j balloon ascents, and a lady parachutist 'making a sensational dive out of the jbig, tilting, sluggishly-floating gas-baS ;oerhead, and even then sajre old ladies «ere murmuring and shaking their heads at one another: "Xo, they'll never fly .Man will never fly. ]t was I not meant to be."